Sites can safely display pop-ups on a temporary basis

Google’s John Mueller says that sites can display pop-ups without being affected by the penalty for mobile interstitials, as long as the pop-ups are temporary.

Ever since the intrusive interstitial penalty was introduced in 2016, the word on Google has been to avoid pop-ups from showing mobile visitors or risk having their pages devalued in search.

Now, we’ve learned that it’s safe to show pop-ups on your phone, at least for a limited period of time.

Penalizing intrusive interstitials is not high on the Google web spam team’s priority list, says Mueller.

This topic was raised during the Google Search Center business hours flow, which took place on January 22nd. A question is sent by a website owner asking about using a mobile pop-up for a limited time to capture leads.

The site owner wants to conduct a survey for a week and direct visitors’ attention to it with a pop-up.

Can the site do this without being undervalued in search results?

Here’s what Mueller says.

Google’s John Mueller on Pop-ups and Mobile Search

Mueller says it is unlikely that a website will be undervalued in search results for temporarily showing pop-ups to mobile visitors.

Even if Google devalued the site, it would not be removed from search results. It may even end up in the ranking, despite the pop-up.

What is known as an interstitial “penalty” is a more subtle ranking factor, explains Mueller. Although subtle, it can count against a site in Google’s search ranking to some extent.

If you are going to use a mobile pop-up, Mueller recommends not leaving it too long and not showing it to all visitors who come to your site.

“I don’t think we would penalize a website for something like that. The web spam team has other things to do than penalize a website for having a pop-up.

There are two aspects that can come into play. On the one hand, we have the intrusive interstitials policy on cell phones, so this may be something to keep in mind so that you don’t save too much time or show it to everyone at all times.

With this policy, it is a more subtle ranking factor that we use to slightly adjust the ranking if we notice that there is no useful content on the page when we load it. This is something that can come into play, but it is more something that would be a temporary thing. “

Let’s say you start showing pop-ups to visitors on mobile devices and intend to do so for a short time, but Google picks up the signal immediately. What happens next?

It is not something that will count against your website permanently. Mueller says Google will move on when it crawls its site again and realizes that the pop-up has been removed.

“If you have this survey on your website for a week or more, then during that time, we can pick up that signal, we can respond to that signal, and then, if you removed it, we can essentially move on as well. So it is not that there will be a lasting effect on that. “

Finally, Mueller adds that sites can experience problems if they display a pop-up in place of the appropriate content. It is best not to do this, as Google will index the pop-up content, which will damage the rankings.

“Another aspect that you want to note is if you are displaying the pop-up instead of the normal content, then we will index the content of the pop-up. If you are displaying the pop-up in addition to the existing content, which seems to be the case, then we would still have the existing content to index and that would be normal. “

Listen to the full question and answer in the video below: